Markusic is wise to pursue a pivot to spacecraft. Not only is it higher up the value chain, but rival Rocket Lab is marketing their Photon spacecraft as a satellite bus for smallsat customers, and Firefly will really want something to compete with that. The Hall thruster could be a key differentiating factor here, potentially offering considerably more delta-V than Photon.

Also, this type of spacecraft is a hedge against the existential threat facing dedicated smallsat launch providers. In a worst-case scenario, where super-heavy Starships are providing very low-cost rideshare launches on a daily basis, many customers will still want a capable spacecraft to carry their application-specific payload from the Starship insertion orbit to its operational orbit and provide all the standard satellite bus services throughout the lifecycle.

Their Cedar Park location should be under shutdown orders as of midnight tonight. Their testing facility is in Burnet County, and the county response to the pandemic has been lackluster at best.

Standard "situation is fluid" cliche applies, but aerospace companies of this type are considered "essential" businesses and may continue operations. Virgin Orbit publicly confirmed that they are deemed essential and will continue. That's the closest comparison there is to Firefly.

Boca Chica is under the Cameron County general shutdown order now, but the SpaceX night shift is on site doing their thing, preparing for the Starship SN3 test series. SpaceX announced that one employee and a medical contractor at the Hawthorne facility have tested positive, and 12 others who had contact are under quarantine.

Their Cedar Park location should be under shutdown orders as of midnight tonight. Their testing facility is in Burnet County, and the county response to the pandemic has been lackluster at best.

Standard "situation is fluid" cliche applies, but aerospace companies of this type are considered "essential" businesses and may continue operations. Virgin Orbit publicly confirmed that they are deemed essential and will continue. That's the closest comparison there is to Firefly.

Boca Chica is under the Cameron County general shutdown order now, but the SpaceX night shift is on site doing their thing, preparing for the Starship SN3 test series. SpaceX announced that one employee and a medical contractor at the Hawthorne facility have tested positive, and 12 others who had contact are under quarantine.

The world would survive without Firefly and Virgin Orbit operating. However communication satellites and navigation satellites are vital infrastructure and companies working in that area are essential. Regulations that are coming out currently are not fine tuned, which is not surprising under the current circumstances.

Orbital space travel at least offers a possible return on investment. All the plans for planetary and beyond travel depends totally on governments or people with too much money spending it on Hollywood and Sci Fi dreams. The amounts of money that will be needed to take the first tiny steps to making Starships is stupendous. For the Starships themselves, not Elon's little buses on one way trips is beyond imagining.

Star Trek and Starwars one might note never mention money. How exactly is this all supposed to work?

Why not launch using falcon heavy? If the objective is to move higher up the value chain an provide more integrated services, wouldn't delivering more payload be a better choice when targeting a NASA contract? 37,000lbs to TLI is pretty compelling from a cargo delivery standpoint.

Yeah they have their own rocket, but this allows them to diversify in case of any issues with their launcher.

Why not launch using falcon heavy? If the objective is to move higher up the value chain an provide more integrated services, wouldn't delivering more payload be a better choice when targeting a NASA contract? 37,000lbs to TLI is pretty compelling from a cargo delivery standpoint.

Yeah they have their own rocket, but this allows them to diversify in case of any issues with their launcher.

Because if you're launching a small package to the noon on something like a falcon heavy, you're going to have to rideshare with a bigger customer. Which is of course more economical, but without any control over the schedule. For some customers, the ability to have their own dedicated launch worth the extra cost, which is why small sat launchers have a market.

Astra's Rocket 3.0 suffered a significant anomaly during pre-launch testing at Kodiak AFB which damaged the vehicle and resulted in authorities declaring hazardous conditions in the area of the launch complex. Launch preparations are postponed indefinitely and may be complicated by Alaska's 14-day entry quarantine policy.

Most of what we knew about Astra before they emerged from stealth mode for the DARPA campaign came from environmental remediation documents they were required to file after their two launch attempts resulted in RP-1 contamination of soils within the launch complex. If they popped a tank and spilled kerosene, we'll know about it eventually.

Bigelow Aerospace, which has been developing inflatable space station modules based on technology from the NASA TransHab project, has laid off their entire workforce. The public statement says they intend to rehire and resume operations, but current and former employees don't believe that, and this is likely the end of Bigelow as we know it.

Finally, SpaceX lost a Crew Dragon drop test article when the helicopter pilots encountered unexpected flight control problems and were forced to release the test vehicle prematurely to ensure the safety of the helicopter crew. Since the parachute system was not armed prior to release, the test vehicle impacted the ground at very high speed. The cause of the flight control oscillations is under investigation.

Sad news about Bigelow. They had good ideas at the wrong time. NASA had already built the ISS and the operation cost meant no money for new stations or even new modules. Private demand hadn't yet appeared. 20 years earlier or 20 years later they might have been the name in space station modules.

Sad news about Bigelow. They had good ideas at the wrong time. NASA had already built the ISS and the operation budget of that meant no money for new stations or even new modules. Private demand hadn't yet appeared. 20 years earlier or 20 years later they could be the name in space station modules.

It's sad, and you have an excellent point about the timing for this market, but I get the sense that Bigelow was very far from a functional spacecraft design and that Robert Bigelow was more interested in fictional representations of the concepts than the engineering requirements.

With BEAM, they demonstrated that they can build an inflatable pressure vessel that works quite well. But the B330 was always a fantasy that would never be able to generate nearly enough electrical power or reject enough heat to support long-duration human habitation as a standalone spacecraft. The proportions depicted in the renderings didn't pass the smell test for educated observers, and Bigelow employees apparently circulated an image of what B330 would look like with realistic-sized solar arrays as a form of dark humor.

We need robots in those craters at the poles working on how to exploit the ice resources. That is really the most important step in space exploration right now. And of course very little is happening in that direction. It is almost like some entity is keeping humankind from leaving Earth. All anybody seems to care about is strip mining Earth orbit or fantastical starships to Mars. Bridenstine will likely go down as the greatest space agency administrator ever simply because he focused on lunar resources and getting a Super Heavy Lift Vehicle (SLS) into service. The Moon and a way to get there is first, then robot Landers for In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU). The U.S. should abandon LEO and concentrate on a permanent human presence Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO). The rest is just buffoonery.

We need robots in those craters at the poles working on how to exploit the ice resources. That is really the most important step in space exploration right now. And of course very little is happening in that direction. It is almost like some entity is keeping humankind from leaving Earth. All anybody seems to care about is strip mining Earth orbit or fantastical starships to Mars. Bridenstine will likely go down as the greatest space agency administrator ever simply because he focused on lunar resources and getting a Super Heavy Lift Vehicle (SLS) into service. The Moon and a way to get there is first, then robot Landers for In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU). The U.S. should abandon LEO and concentrate on a permanent human presence Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO). The rest is just buffoonery.

He'll go down as *something* for his support of the Senate Looting Scheme anyway. 🤣

Sad news about Bigelow. They had good ideas at the wrong time. NASA had already built the ISS and the operation budget of that meant no money for new stations or even new modules. Private demand hadn't yet appeared. 20 years earlier or 20 years later they could be the name in space station modules.

It's sad, and you have an excellent point about the timing for this market, but I get the sense that Bigelow was very far from a functional spacecraft design and that Robert Bigelow was more interested in fictional representations of the concepts than the engineering requirements.

With BEAM, they demonstrated that they can build an inflatable pressure vessel that works quite well. But the B330 was always a fantasy that would never be able to generate nearly enough electrical power or reject enough heat to support long-duration human habitation as a standalone spacecraft. The proportions depicted in the renderings didn't pass the smell test for educated observers, and Bigelow employees apparently circulated an image of what B330 would look like with realistic-sized solar arrays as a form of dark humor.

Speaking of solar arrays, I think they missed a more realistic nearer term opportunity there, with the singular focus on space habs, their technology could have easily been applicable to a stowage/deployment system for solar arrays and other spacecraft hardware. One of the things that their system lacked was external hard points to enable mounting of hardware, trusses and EVA assist systems be it an inchworm arm or some rails or both. There were points on each end of the modules but nothing along the main body. Yes it would make it more complicated to collapse down, but it'd be pretty practical to have.

The primary propulsion system also might not have passed the sniff test, due to how much water it would take for station keeping of something that large with an electrolysis sourced h2/O2 propulsion system, as well as the heat it would generate.

We need robots in those craters at the poles working on how to exploit the ice resources. That is really the most important step in space exploration right now. And of course very little is happening in that direction. It is almost like some entity is keeping humankind from leaving Earth. All anybody seems to care about is strip mining Earth orbit or fantastical starships to Mars. Bridenstine will likely go down as the greatest space agency administrator ever simply because he focused on lunar resources and getting a Super Heavy Lift Vehicle (SLS) into service. The Moon and a way to get there is first, then robot Landers for In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU). The U.S. should abandon LEO and concentrate on a permanent human presence Beyond Earth Orbit (BEO). The rest is just buffoonery.

SLS is too freaking expensive. And lunar ISRU is only really helpful in getting off the moon, energetically its a significant detour in getting anywhere else in the solar system. Without Earth Orbit Rendezvous, even with SHLVs we can only really send a few people to Luna at a time without going to something like Sea Dragon, EOR and multi launch/ distributed lift means that almost any payload we can get into LEO we can take to Luna or Mars, and we can do it with LVs that are useful for a wide range of Earth orbit activities rather than something special purpose for exploration, thus reducing costs by possibly multiple orders of magnitude. The lunar ice also has another problem (this is just the ice not what is in the form of hydroxyl) in a vacuum with relatively low gravity it takes a very small amount of heat for a lot of it to sublimate, which could mean even putting a rover in those craters can be a risk, especially if it has to drive into it crossing the constantly lit hills around it. That's if its in the form of H2O, if its in hydroxyl, then its slightly easier if a bit more energy intensive as you need to break the bond it has to whatever minerals its attached to. In any case, you are going to need to bring a lot of large equipment to the surface something that a single launch or minimal launch architecture is simply not practical for.

Markusic is wise to pursue a pivot to spacecraft. Not only is it higher up the value chain, but rival Rocket Lab is marketing their Photon spacecraft as a satellite bus for smallsat customers, and Firefly will really want something to compete with that. The Hall thruster could be a key differentiating factor here, potentially offering considerably more delta-V than Photon.

Also, this type of spacecraft is a hedge against the existential threat facing dedicated smallsat launch providers. In a worst-case scenario, where super-heavy Starships are providing very low-cost rideshare launches on a daily basis, many customers will still want a capable spacecraft to carry their application-specific payload from the Starship insertion orbit to its operational orbit and provide all the standard satellite bus services throughout the lifecycle.

Of course the trade off with the delta v for a Hall Effect thruster is the limited thrust, this means that altering the orbit for a "last mile" service will take months, even if the rideshares are monthly that isn't ideal. The existential threat is cheap regular rideshare in combination with a middling thrust/isp spacecraft that can get small sats to their preferred orbits from the mega rideshare insertion orbit in a reasonable timeframe and low cost.